The Greens/EFA faction of the European Parliament is suing the EFSA because the agency refuses to release secret documents from its 2015 glyphosate review. The EFSA always has proclaimed openly that it depends upon secret documents it is fed by the corporations. In other words, the regulator openly admits that it uses no science in its reviews, but only corporate innuendo. This is in complete contrast to the WHO’s IARC cancer research agency, whose guidelines require it to use only published studies. The IARC requires itself to stay within the bounds of legitimate science, while the EFSA and EPA explicitly disavow science and stay within the bounds of secret corporate decrees.

Under public pressure the EFSA did release a fragmentary, heavily redacted version of the corporate materials, and did find collaborators willing to provide political cover for this fraudulent “disclosure”. The EFSA now says no public interest would be served by full disclosure. In addition to being an explicit abdication of the canons of science, which by definition requires public perusal, this is the EFSA’s open admission that it does not view itself as acting in the public interest, since it explicitly avows that the public interest, at best, must be limited by the corporate interest. The Greens/EFA statement partially endorses this, agreeing that there’s a “balance that should be struck.” We abolitionists of course recognize no such fraudulent “balance”, but will never settle for anything less than the full public interest and the full publicity of anything claiming to represent “science”.

Once again we have the standard state of things:

1. The myth of the public interest regulator.

2. The reality of the regulator controlled by the corporation and ideologically committed to serving the corporation.

3. The regulator lies, claiming to be trying to “strike a balance”. This already partially abrogates the myth of the public interest. In reality, the regulator recognizes no public interest at all, except insofar as this may trickle down from corporate domination.

4. “Reformers” have already surrendered that far, and they abet that extent of the lie. So we can assume that over time they’ll continue to surrender ground and abet further lies as the corporate assault advances.

As the piece points out, the EFSA could, if it really were under legal constraint with regard to publicizing its alleged data, ask the court to order it to publish the data. But of course no regulator would ever make such a request, because they lie about being under such constraint. No regulator ever has its hands tied by intellectual property law. On the contrary, they ardently, actively, ideologically support the poisoner project and all its elements. This includes the “secret science” the regulators require in order to perform their sham reviews.

As I’ve writtenmany times before, this strong regulator bias on behalf of the corporations and against the public good and against science does not arise primarily from superficial venal corruption. It arises from a far more profound existential corruption, a corruption of all canons of human morality and reason. While de jure corruption is common, it’s epiphenomenal compared to the overall ideological and methodological framework of technocracy and the corporate science paradigm. Cadres of an agency like the EFSA or ECHA, or the US EPA, FDA, and USDA, operate according to the corporate/technocratic template. Its three components are:

1. The corporate power/profit project is normative. It is the primary purpose of civilization. Under no circumstance can any other value or alternative project be allowed significantly to hinder the corporate project.

This has profound implications for actions like a pesticide cancer review. For technocratic regulators to acknowledge the fact that all synthetic pesticides cause widespread cancer would significantly hinder the corporate project. Therefore even the prospect of such acknowledgement is ruled out a priori. By definition it cannot be part of the review. Only the most grossly excessive and obvious cancerousness on the part of a particular chemical could be acknowledged even in principle. When outfits like the US EPA or the EU’s EFSA claim to believe that glyphosate is not cancerous, this is not according to any rational or scientific canon of evidence, and reformers who interpret it this way make a mistake about the fundamental character of these organizations.

Rather, technocratic regulators apply the canon of the corporate paradigm. According to this canon “causes cancer” is defined as: “So grossly carcinogenic that it’s politically impossible to deny it, to the point that lack of action would in itself be significantly bad for business.” For the government, just as much as for the corporation, cancer is purely political.

This leads to the template’s second component.

2. Given the strictures of (1), the regulator may if absolutely necessary impose limits on the most excessive harms and worst abuses. More often, it only pretends to do even this. Which leads to the template’s third component.

3. The regulator then puts its imprimatur on the corporate project as having been sufficiently regulated for safety. According to the ideology of technocracy and bureaucracy, the people are supposed to believe implicitly in the competence, rigor, and honesty of the regulator. They’re supposed to believe this for all measures of safety, public and environmental health, political and socioeconomic benefit and lack of harm.

All this is based on a Big Lie, since as we described above the regulator actually functions only according to the normative values of corporate power. But it fraudulently claims, always implicitly and very often explicitly, that it has acted on behalf of human values and to protect and serve the people. Therefore, the ideology goes, the people should repose implicit trust in the regulator rather than assert themselves democratically in any kind of grassroots way. Most of all, the people must not start to think in any political terms which would be based on fundamentally different values and goals, values and goals opposed to those of corporate rule and technocracy.

Thus we see how technocracy is an ideology, method, and form of government which is fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-political as such since it is dedicated to the proposition that the people should relinquish all political activity and passively receive and believe the judgements of technocratic regulators. This system is based fundamentally on the Big Lie that it actually is a form of democracy and a form of society which encourages the political participation of the people. But in fact it conjures only sham versions of these and seeks aggressively to discourage and suppress any true politics.

This ideology and method is especially critical for the poisoner campaign, whose continued domination depends upon the people’s opposition remaining strait-jacketed within the bonds of regulator-based reformism. It’s essential that no significant number of people attain an abolitionist consciousness and commit to the abolitionist goal.

We see how the corporate state and technocracy, along with their allied economic ideology of neoliberalism, exist as species within the same genus as classical fascism. This is the genus of pseudo-democratic forms bled of all real political content which then stand as cultural facades behind which exists only state tyranny. Today’s corporate state is the most fully evolved form of this tyranny.

We continue to compile information about the fraudulence of the European glyphosate reviews. Chris Portier, a cancer expert who has served with the IARC and participated in its 2015 review confirming that glyphosate causes cancer, has analyzed the EFSA’s partial release of the information upon which it based its review, as well as a 2015 paper disseminated by the industry’s Glyphosate Task Force (GTF). He finds that the German Agency for Risk Assessment (BfR, the agency which carries out Germany’s role as the EU’s “rapporteur state” for glyphosate), the EFSA, and the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) all distorted their interpretations of the industry’s own glyphosate studies in order to suppress the studies’ evidence that glyphosate causes tumors in rodents. In fact, the EU agencies now follow the BfR in simply regurgitating the GTF’s talking points where it comes to distorting and suppressing the data.

Portier details several elements of fraudulent methodology.

* EFSA’s classification of the human evidence as “very limited” is not a valid characterization under the relevant EU law (the CLP guidelines) and fails to properly address the strength of the available evidence;
* Both EFSA and ECHA dismissed positive findings because they fell inside of the range of the historical controls (this is an improper use of historical control evidence);
* Both EFSA and ECHA compared findings across different animal strains and different study durations to conclude that studies were inconsistent (this is not scientifically justifiable); and
* Both EFSA and ECHA characterize the evidence for genotoxicity (DNA damage) as negative, yet a review of the evidence released by EFSA and the open scientific literature suggest there are many studies demonstrating genotoxicity.

These are typical of the way regulators distort and suppress the science. As is also typical, the regulatory agencies followed the lead of Monsanto’s GTF in deploying these fraudulent methods. The corporation typically is the mentor and teacher of the regulator

Therefore we have the latest information for the ongoing political struggle to ban glyphosate, as part of the greater imperative to abolish all synthetic pesticides. Here’s the takeaways.

4. This includes the new paradigm of “secret science”. But according to the canons of scientific method, science by definition is public. Therefore secret science is a contradiction in terms. If it’s not publicized, it’s not part of the scientific record, period.

5. The corporate and regulator lust for secrecy proves, among other things, that the real evidence is even worse than they’ve been forced to let out. The existence of secret science in itself is strict proof that the governments and corporations know or believe that to perform and publicize real science would bring results damning to their products, pesticides and GMOs. It proves that whatever evidence they have condemns these poisons.

6. Regulators are not public servants but corporate servants. These agencies are indelibly pro-corporate and always serve the corporation, never the people. This is their real job, while propaganda about public service is just a lie.

We depart from Portier in the prescription, of course. As an establishment scientist he’s committed to endlessly proposing reforms, i.e. begging the criminals to stop committing crimes. We abolitionists, by contrast, take his findings as further proof that these regulatory institutions are indelibly criminal organizations which never can be redeemed, nor their mandate to “manage” poisonism be reformed. On the contrary, the poisons these agencies “regulate” must be abolished. We’ve had enough of these poisons’ agronomic failure and destruction, enough of their health and environmental devastation, and enough of the political sham.

Just another stone to add to the Everest of proof that the regulators are inherently pro-poison. This particular act, like almost all such acts, was not “corruption”. It was standard, everyday, banal procedure, in accord with the institutional ideology and mandate. The only corruption we can meaningfully speak of is the fact that, relative to all canons of human morality and reason, pro-corporate regulation is existentially corrupt. But as for de jure “corruption”, that’s nothing more than a drop in the ocean.

As for those who retain faith in the idea of such regulation, it’s bizarre how someone can, day after day, read and comment on pieces, each of whose content boils down to “the EPA is fundamentally pro-pesticide and pro-GMO” or “the FDA is pro-GMO”, and yet simultaneously hold the faith that such regulatory agencies are basically good, sound institutions, there to serve the people, institutions which humanity needs to have. Underlying this is the prior, unspoken assumption that the thing being regulated, such as pesticides and GMOs, also is something basically good, just in need of regulation. Faith in the regulator is a manifestation of wanting to co-exist with Monsanto and its poisons.

Abolitionism denies this implicit, primary proposition, renders it explicit, and from there denies the secondary, surface, “political” proposition. Therefore we reject today’s political configuration and call for a new one.

We recognize that it’s impossible to “regulate” poisonism, impossible to “manage” it, there can be no “tolerance level” of it, and therefore it’s intrinsically impossible for an institution dedicated to such regulation, management, setting of tolerances, to play any constructive role.

We cannot “regulate” agricultural poisons, we need to abolish them completely.

Corporations and reformers always come together for what matters most.

(This is just a short piece. It’s a foretaste of a longer treatment I have in the works dealing with the pathology of hankering for “more and better testing.”)

We see where the seemingly permanent rut of fetishizing “more data” and “more testing” gets one. After endless begging by people who aren’t capable of understanding what the EFSA’s cover-up means and going from there, the EFSA finally, grudgingly, released a portion of its hitherto “secret science” to a few carefully selected scientist and public advocate recipients. The result, according to Corporate Europe Observatory’s survey of the collaborating scientists:

“The data is very difficult to handle and cannot be used for publication, making it impossible for scientists to use.”

In other words it’s a scam which has found all too many voluntary collaborators and all too few intelligent and principled denouncers. This was predictable and predicted. Any scientist with integrity would boycott this fake “disclosure” and publicly denounce it as a scam, for the exact reasons detailed in this piece.

Here’s a brief description of the EFSA’s “disclosure”: The documents are image PDFs which cannot be machine-searched or used with other software; the documents are grossly redacted, including the summary, methodology and conclusions; the release came with a threat that any recipient who publishes any part of it might be sued by the industry for violating intellectual property law. “So we did not publish it for now…”

To correct the headline, this most definitely is not “better than nothing”, it is worse, nor “could [it] in principle allow limited scrutiny on the agency’s glyphosate assessment work, and some insights”. Why anyone would be willing to settle for “limited scrutiny” is beyond me, but at any rate we see how it doesn’t allow even that, but rather scrutiny skewed according to Monsanto’s specifications.

But instead of dealing with this as the self-evident fraud it is, the piece and the collaborating scientists treat it as some kind of brain teaser.

What’s truly disturbing about even the seemingly more honest and socially responsible scientists isn’t just their bottomless political naivete which allows them to be so easily manipulated this way, but the way incidents like this highlight how existentially corrupt even they are. Any true scientist automatically rejects “secret science” as inadmissible by definition and rejects anything short of 100% public disclosure as unacceptable. This is non-negotiable, and no true scientist or public advocate would collaborate in any kind of fraud which flouts this non-negotiable baseline. But here we see yet again how our “reformers” endorse secret science, consider its existence negotiable and acceptable, and merely decry some “excesses”. Many of them see themselves as part of the technocratic elite and merely want to be accepted by the corporate establishment. That’s why they’re willing to serve as specially selected recipients of otherwise still secret information instead of demanding full public release as non-negotiable. To use a metaphor commonly used by political traitors to describe themselves, they merely want “a seat at the table” and nothing more. This is yet another proof of wanting to make a deal to co-exist with Monsanto.

I’m not aware of any of the specially selected recipients who rejected the release on the grounds I cite here. Evidently Monsanto selected the recipients well.

And to repeat the obvious fact of rationality and political tactics, secret science and covering up the facts is strict automatic proof that whatever evidence the corporations and regulators have is adverse to the product. Therefore the very fact that Monsanto and the EFSA have felt the need to resort to secrecy is proof that they know or suspect glyphosate causes cancer. It’s a clear admission of guilt on their part.

The tactical implications are obvious for anyone who’s really serious about abolishing these poisons and not just blowing smoke. We relentlessly denounce the system for its secrecy and, as I just did here, emphasize how secret science in itself is proof of the harmfulness of the product. As a matter of course we demand complete publication and a complete end to the cover-up. But since we know from history that any concession from the regulator and/or corporation will be fraudulent, we pre-emptively reject, on principle, anything short of full, 100% uncensored public disclosure, and we refuse any cooperation with any such scam. On the contrary, we redouble the condemnation. The EFSA’s fake disclosure only proves further that whatever they’re hiding damns glyphosate.

To restate the basic fact: We have far more than enough evidence which rationally proves that glyphosate causes cancer. By the strict proof of the system’s cover-ups and secret science and systematic refusal to conduct legitimate safety studies we also have proof that governments and corporations know or believe that glyphosate causes cancer. We don’t need more evidence, we need much better and more relentless, disciplined, cumulative communication of the evidence we do have.

This is also true of all other pesticides, all of which are cancer agents. And it’s true of glyphosate’s many other health ravages. And it’s true of GMOs. In these cases as well, the rote call for “more testing”, “better testing”, is at best procrastination on the part of those who have no idea what to do. In many cases it’s worse than this, intentional delaying and gate-keeping tactics.

The only thing the EFSA’s fake disclosure accomplished was to provide yet another lesson in how lukewarm most critics of poisonism still are. The EFSA hopes it’ll also allay some of the weaker-minded criticism and reassure the public. Those who collaborate are trying to assist the EFSA and Monsanto in this.

I’ll close with the observation that this isn’t just about the abolition struggle. Anyone who cares about the integrity of science itself must regard the campaign of secret science as an abhorrent scourge. Here too one must be an abolitionist. At the very least, one must never be weak, wavering, willing to compromise and collaborate on such a fundamental point. This point on secret science is so fundamental that anyone who would compromise here certainly would compromise anywhere and has no firm principle at all. It’s clear, on both practical and principled grounds, that the one and only valid position on “secret science” is total rejection and refusal to countenance anything short of 100% public transparency.

Have I been too severe in this piece? Well, we’ll see if anyone learns a lesson from the incident and publicly expresses that lesson. But if they persist on their “more and better testing” co-existence course, we already know the truth. Persistence Proves Intent, always.

This is true, spoken by an EU Green Parliament member against the European Food Safety Agency: “It is not your destiny to be independent. You rely on studies by industry. You have no means of commissioning independent studies….Stop pretending you are an independent institution.” That’s about the best we can expect from electoral representatives within the corporate system, from parties dedicated to “reforming”, i.e. preserving, the corporate system. In the end the goal of electoralism is the same as the goal of regulatory agencies, to ensure that all possible destinies remain within the bounds of corporate domination.

One of the tasks of the abolitionists, and of all who seek a human destiny free of corporate rule is to use such facts (the EFSA’s complete subservience to industry, as detailed for the millionth time in the piece linked above; here’s more) and such testimony to go one better and speak, not within the elitist framework as those already within it always do (the above quote is not packaged rhetorically for the people but was directed at the EFSA’s chief), but directly to the people, speaking the much greater truth: We must renounce and obliterate religious faith in agencies like the EFSA or EPA and the inherently pro-poison regulatory model upon which they’re founded.

Unfortunately, system NGOs have an opposed ideology. GMWatch testifies:

GMWatch and many other NGOs, however, advocate that regulatory and expert advisory bodies like EFSA should not rely on studies directly sponsored by industry – but they also insist that the public should not pay for them.

The groups have long advocated a system whereby money for safety studies is provided by the industry that wishes to bring a product to market. The money would be paid into a publicly administered fund, which would use it to commission independent laboratories to carry out safety studies.

All results would have to be published on the Internet before the product came to market, putting an end to the current system whereby the studies are the proprietary data of industry and are kept secret.

Both EU laws and international agreements reached under the auspices of the OECD would need to be changed to accommodate the new system. But it is the bare minimum of reform that is needed to restore public trust in the regulatory framework for risky substances such as pesticides and GMOs.

And I wish I had a billion dollars. Indeed this goes into the territory of infantile fantasy. Where has this ever been done? Where has there ever existed such a political campaign, which would be designed like these NGOs and share their ideology, but be rather more assertive in action. Here’s the traits of such an organization:

**Pro-capitalist, pro-corporate, wanting to co-exist with poison-based agriculture but wanting really to regulate it, wonkish, enamored of complex funding and assessment mechanisms which nevertheless would maintain integrity, believing in the essential goodness of people even within the framework of profit-seeking and “competition”, possessing the political and cultural skill to communicate all this coherently to enough people to muster broad, active political support for this system, and most of all having the organizational strength, relentlessness, ruthlessness, and force of will necessary to remain permanently vigilant and at a state of high alert against the attrition and corruption of this bureaucratic system.**

Most astounding of all, many who believe in this fantastic Millennium (which has been disproven by the facts over and over) then turn around and claim they’re being “practical” while abolitionism is “unrealistic”. Nowhere has the insanity of modern politics more profoundly turned truth upside down and forced words to mean the opposite of what they really mean than where liberal and reformist types invert the words “practical” and “pragmatic” to mean their exact opposite, the most extreme, impossible fantasies.

In fact such fantasy isn’t the real goal of these NGOs, but merely is religious cant they ritually recite. If you have any doubt about how NGOs like GMWatch consider their mission really to be propping up faith in the corporate system, Monsanto and all, whether they’re conscious of this or not, read again the final line in that quote: “[I]t is the bare minimum of reform that is needed to restore public trust in the regulatory framework for risky substances such as pesticides and GMOs.”

Quite a peculiar way of putting things, isn’t it? (And it’s not unusual; on the contrary it’s a desire they frequently express.) You might think the primary goal is the health of the people and environment, the safety of our food and water, with “the regulatory framework” being just one of many possible strategies toward this goal, to be assessed and used or not used depending upon whether or not it works. You might think “public trust in the regulatory framework” can be good or evil depending on what this framework really is and what it does, and must never be a goal in itself.

But this was not a mistaken formulation on their part. As the quote expresses, system NGOs truly do believe their primary goal is to keep the corporate project going, as I have written so many times in describing the corporate-technocratic regulatory template (most recently here). Therefore where it comes to regulation the number one priority of system NGOs is to prop up faith in the regulatory framework as such. Meanwhile the number one priority of the regulator is to ensure that the corporate project goes forward. The regulator may curb or more often only pretends to curb the worst “abuses”, while the NGO pretends to be vigilant in ensuring the regulator carries out its own pretense. Then both assure the public that everything is fine, the system is working as it should, corporate poisons are being deployed only in “safe” ways, and that everyone can go about their private lives and forget about public matters. Most of all, everyone can stop even thinking about politics. The regulator vouches for the corporation and, for the constituency among the people for whom the regulator’s word isn’t enough, the NGO vouches for the regulator. Thus the regulator is running a scam and the NGO is running a meta-scam, a scam squared. The goal is to ensure that all possible destinies remain within the corporate-normative paradigm.

We can go further. The system NGOs work to set up a technocratic, “expert”-brokered paradigm of “politics”, wherein the people are supposed to do nothing but assimilate the news as provided by the NGO, do politically only what the NGO tells them to do (usually sign petitions and sometimes “call your Congressman”), and of course keep sending money. The goal is to ensure that all possible political destinies remain within the corporate-normative framework.

We see how for system NGOs the regulatory model is the object of religious worship and its perpetuation the focus of all their activity. Thus, as GMWatch says here, the most important thing is to prop up public faith in the regulator at all costs and without reference to whether or not this system “works” toward any other goal. The formulation is clear: The regulatory system’s existence is the priority, what it actually does is of secondary importance at best. This follows perfectly the regulatory template I’ve discussed dozens of times. For recent discussions see here, here, and here.

And then this strain of the technocratic religion goes hand in hand with the religion of electoralism, “voting” as an object of religious worship rather than just a tactic toward a concrete goal. We see how in both cases the pseudo-political religion is ultimately opposed to abolitionism and to any movement which is honest, which has a concrete goal, and which embraces this goal as the non-negotiable priority, placing all else in the realm of tactics to be assessed in a purely practical, rational way.

We see the extreme difference and opposition between movements whose goal is concrete, and status quo religions like electoralism and regulator-ism whose non-negotiable goals are nothing but fog and diffusion: Voting as such, the regulatory model as such. For these the only real goal is to ensure that all possible political destinies remain within the corporate framework.

And then both of these cults are part of the broad infamy of neoliberalism, whose ideology is corporate-technocratic domination and whose strategy is to use the forms of democracy, not just to come to power in the first place as in the case of classical fascism, but to maintain power and become ever more totalitarian while using a minimum of direct, overt coercion and violence.

We see how electoralism turned out to be a world-historical mistake on humanity’s part. At least for the duration of the fossil-fuel era, we must understand that it can never be a value or goal in itself but only a tactic to be used or not according to circumstance.

As for the regulatory model, it always was transparently a fraud, and in any event the history of over a century is unequivocal. That’s especially true of the regulation of broadly deployed corporate poisons like agroechemicals. It’s been a long, long time since anyone could claim to be innocently mistaken about the likes of the EPA or EFSA. To still espouse faith in this model can only be terminal conformism, stupidity, and corruption. Most of all, it reveals that one is indelibly a technocracy believer and a believer in corporate rule. One believes only in destinies that are encompassed within the death zone of corporate dominion. That says it all, and whether or not one’s petty preference is then to attempt to “regulate” some “abuses” is just a minor detail, a consumerist lifestyle ornament. It has no political substance, and no relation to any reality-based, concrete, necessary goal such as the great need to abolish agricultural poisons. But only those who follow the paths of necessity can even envision a destiny independent of corporate domination and all its evils.

Help propagate the necessary ideas.

Comments Off on Destinies: Dependent and Independent of Corporate Domination

Today we live in fear of cancer, one of the great and insidious fears deeply delving, haunting the civilized psyche. We know that the power structures ranging uncannily above us like storm clouds, pelting us unpredictably with rain and winds, are insinuating this cancer through the industrial poisons they pump into our air, water, and food. We know this adds up to an existential incarceration and we fear we’re on death row. People don’t know what to do, which is why denial is the most common response. To those who struggle to overcome denial, the corporate state directs its propaganda campaigns.

The most directly potent cancer agents are the agricultural poisons. Humanity has no choice but to come together as a movement dedicated to abolishing these poisons. Nothing less can liberate us from the fear and the reality of cancer. So far this movement does not yet exist, only the necessary idea for it.

Once in awhile one of these poisons becomes the subject of a political flash point. Today glyphosate, one of the most cancerous agricultural poisons, is under fire. Even some governments and other system forces have been cutting ties with it. Where this happens we abolitionists must urge all effective anti-poison actions and use the situation for the greatest benefit to the necessary ideas and to organizing for these ideas. But we must never regress to faith in discredited enemy organizations. Thus where we have evidence of discord at the EPA we use it to demonstrate that the evidence against the poisons is so extreme that even within the ranks of the enemy some are losing faith. But we must never give aid and comfort to reactionary notions about wanting to “reform” the regulator, or any version of wanting to resurrect faith in it. This is the main preoccupation of gatekeeper consumerist groups who really seek a deal with the corporations.

The EPA has been forced into damage mode by the rising tsunami against glyphosate. From the mainstream point of view, the milestone was the 2015 finding of the World Health Organization’s cancer research agency (IARC) that glyphosate causes cancer. According to secret Monsanto memos forced into the public light by ongoing litigation, the EPA tipped off Monsanto about the IARC’s upcoming finding and helped Monsanto prepare an attack. This included EPA officials working to prevent an investigation of glyphosate’s cancerousness by the Department of Health and Human Services, and academics agreeing to have their names placed on “scientific” papers actually written by Monsanto public relations cadres.

In April 2016 the EPA publicly released a document declaring glyphosate to be “unlikely to be carcinogenic to humans”, then withdrew it from public view. The memo publicly existed just long enough for Monsanto to tout it as an EPA formal public opinion. The EPA implicitly endorses this Monsanto characterization even as it claims the memo was posted inadvertently. This clearly is a lie.

What’s really happening is that the evidence of glyphosate’s cancerousness is so overwhelming that the EPA is scared to defend this position in full public view. Seeing how badly the EU’s EFSA has been floundering in public since its own formal declaration in 2015, the EPA has been unable to assemble a propaganda package it feels comfortable defending. That’s why it’s been stonewalling and resorting to such tricks as now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t with public releases. This has been nothing but an innuendo campaign meant to prop up the pro-glyphosate status quo without actually having to make a formal public declaration. The EPA knows it can never plausibly defend any such declaration, since it’s in the nature of the brazen pro-glyphosate lie that it can have no plausible content or evidence to justify it.

We’ve been getting more details about the EPA’s internal angst. According to a secret EPA memo leaked to a French magazine, there’s an internal dispute about the agency’s campaign to whitewash glyphosate. The EPA’s Office of Research and Development (ORD) accuses the Office of Pesticide Programs (OPP, the division which released and then suppressed the April 2016 memo) of using a reductive, anti-scientific measure instead of the internationally agreed scientific measure. All agencies including the EPA agree in principle to use a scale of five levels in assessing the cancerousness of a chemical, ranging from “carcinogenic” to “unlikely to be carcinogenic”. (The WHO’s cancer agency found glyphosate to be a “probable carcinogen”, the second most severe ranking.) According to the ORD’s memo, in practice the OPP drops this and applies a reductive Yes/No measure rigged always to give a No answer.

The OPP refuses to divulge the methodology it uses. This is because it really uses no method at all. It only starts with the dogma that it will whitewash the chemical, then engages in whatever convolution is necessary to reach this conclusion. Evidently these methodological convolutions are so contorted as to be laughable, which is why the EPA is refusing to release and stand by a public proclamation.

Nevertheless the EPA’s intent and result is the same: Whitewash glyphosate. Prop it up as long as possible. EPA performs this role most directly on behalf of Monsanto, the politically powerful corporation most precariously dependent upon glyphosate.

It’s Green vs. Green, and the EPA exalts that of Mammon, not of the Earth

Yesterday we discussed further how examples of so-called “conflict of interest” highlight the fact that corporate regulators have no such conflict, since in principle as well as practice they exist to serve the corporate imperative. Therefore to fixate on superficial conflicts of interest and conventional notions of corruption is to mistake the character of the entity. Whether or not a soldier in your unit is pilfering from the ration depot is less important than the fact that he’s really an enemy officer wearing the wrong uniform. That’s how we have to understand the sham of a “public interest” regulator, as well as many other types of entities which claim to act in the public interest but really act only in the technocratic corporate interest.

Greenpeace has posted the ECHA’s response to its letter accusing the body of allowing conflicts of interest to ferment on its glyphosate review panel. This comes the same day as another public interest group, the US Right to Know, announced it is suing the EPA for that body’s flouting of USRTK’s many Freedom of Information Act requests.

EPA’s handling of its pro-glyphosate propaganda mandate has been especially brazen and clumsy. Last April its Cancer Assessment Review Committee (CARC) posted on the EPA website a memo whitewashing glyphosate’s cancerousness. EPA suppressed the post a few days later claiming it was supposed to be secret and had been posted inadvertently. In the meantime Monsanto copied the post and proceeded to tout it in public and in court, with full EPA approval.

Here the regulator’s pro-poison brazenness is extreme even by their standards. They post the fraudulent imprimatur, then quickly delete it claiming it’s not for public perusal, even as the corporation, with the regulator’s approval, publicizes this now-phantom imprimatur.

This proves that EPA’s phony “evidence” is so poor that even given the regulator’s extremely low standards, it doesn’t feel confident about posting even a sham assessment.

The ECHA also is nervous about how well its own lies will go over, to the point it didn’t issue the anticipated assessment on March 8th. The glyphosate panel meets again on the 15th.

Greenpeace summarizes the five main points of the regulator’s position.

*ECHA explains how it manages specific conflicts of interest, but fails to address concerns about conflicts of interest that can affect ECHA’s overall work.

*Allowing experts to move freely between the private sector and public authorities, even if employment periods do not overlap, is the definition of revolving doors.

*Conflicts of interest related to industry consultancy cannot simply be declared. They must be ruled out.

*If an expert opinion in relation to regulatory processes can be omitted from the declaration of interests, the requirement to disclose such interests may as well be scrapped. These rules only make sense if they are enforced.

*Dependence on unpublished scientific evidence provided by industry calls into question the independence of scientific assessments conducted by European agencies.

(Note how Greenpeace itself insensibly parrots the enemy’s self-assessments, calling these usually ignorant and incompetent corporate operatives “experts”, and especially referring to secret science as “unpublished scientific evidence”. But secret science is a contradiction in terms and by definition is not scientific evidence. On the contrary, it’s evidence of nothing but the fact that the regulator is an indelible pro-corporate, pro-poison liar, an extension of industry. These examples are all too typical, and it’s a measure of the lack of political consciousness among anti-poison types. One measure of the mature evolution of a movement, much like a nation, is that it attains a coherent language and becomes disciplined in the use of that language. On the other hand to remain unconsciously mired in foreign terminology, especially using the terms imposed by one’s chauvinist oppressor, is the mark of immaturity and lack of political consciousness. Of course this lack of terminological consciousness and discipline is part of the same immaturity which remains mired in infantile “good civics” notions of what these regulatory agencies indelibly are. I’ve been writing these essays toward the goal of demolishing these notions and fostering movement evolution beyond them.)

Each of these five points highlights aspects of the true regulator character.

*”ECHA explains how it manages specific conflicts of interest, but fails to address concerns about conflicts of interest that can affect ECHA’s overall work.” In other words ECHA will, for cosmetic reasons, pretend to guard against the most brazen “conflicts”. But it does not in fact recognize such conflicts as having any real existence, and regards the combined corporate/regulator organism as normative and normal. This applies to each individual agent as much as it does to the agency as a whole. In its reply the ECHA explicitly says it regards this combined organism as normative “in principle” as well as desirable for practical reasons.

*”Allowing experts to move freely between the private sector and public authorities, even if employment periods do not overlap, is the definition of revolving doors.” As we’ve long known, regulators flat out do not consider the revolving door to be a problem. It’s a feature. It’s normative.

*”Conflicts of interest related to industry consultancy cannot simply be declared. They must be ruled out.” Since the regulator does not recognize any such conflict in the first place, it certainly will not regard anything more than a declaration as ever necessary, and even this only where it’s politically forced upon them.

Of course the regulator always points out that the system is designed to promote the combined public/private character of all institutions and personnel. Higher education is designed systematically to indoctrinate personnel into the corporate technocrat ideology, which is centered on the principle that the nominally “public” government exists to serve the corporations, which are indeed creations of government and extensions of government. These cadres proceed to careers where they’re completely immersed in the revolving door, the close collaboration of corporate and regulator operatives, and the complete dependency of the private sector on public subsidies. This relentlessly inculcates the technocratic mindset of the corporate state.

When we grasp this in its full magnitude, we see how picayune it is to think in terms of “conflicts of interest” and “corruption”. The entire technocratic system is predicated on one massive conflict between the corporate interest and the human interest. The entire system is one massive kleptocracy which views humanity and the Earth as literally nothing but a resource mine and waste dump. If we speak here of corruption we can speak only of corruption at the most extreme metaphysical level.

*”If an expert opinion in relation to regulatory processes can be omitted from the declaration of interests, the requirement to disclose such interests may as well be scrapped. These rules only make sense if they are enforced.” This refers to the ECHA’s fraudulent demarcation of “scientific positions” and propaganda (what it calls “influencing public debate”) as separate from one’s being “part of a regulatory, legislative, or judicial process.” Greenpeace correctly recognizes that where STEM cadres organize to issue a public statement about a current policy controversy, they are not acting as scientists nor are they merely exercising “freedom of opinion”, but are acting as political operatives and lobbyists, working to influence policy. The reference is to ECHA panelists who were signees of a public letter which regurgitated industry lies about endocrine disruptors. This propaganda campaign was part of the EU’s ongoing regulatory stonewallagainst enforcement of EU law which requires the banning of endocrine disruptors (i.e., all pesticides). This too is a typical example of the corporate/regulator combined organism.

*”Dependence on unpublished scientific evidence provided by industry calls into question the independence of scientific assessments conducted by European agencies.” As we said above, there is no such evidence. The fact that the regulator is dependent upon the phantasmic “secret science” is proof that the industry and the regulator have literally zero science on their side, and that on the contrary the science is 100% against them, damningly so. Secrecy is, in fact, proof and an admission of the worst suspicions of critics. In this case, it is proof that glyphosate causes cancer and the ECHA knows it. Just as the EFSA and US EPA know it.

Of course the ECHA’s response is bogus in the conventional sense in that it doesn’t just operate according to Orwellian definitions of concepts like “conflict” but pretends to be using terms in the same way as its reformist interlocutor. Both strands of the lie are always operative. Both are core parts of technocracy’s culture of the lie.

But they couldn’t do this without willing collaborators. Organizations like Greenpeace seem committed to believing in the sham good-civics notion of public regulators, i.e. what gullible children are taught in the system schools. For all their talk of evidence, it seems they’ll never have enough evidence to reach the conclusion that an organization like the ECHA is an indelibly pro-industry, pro-poison organization, and was designed to be so in the first place. Compare if a public interest group wrote a letter to Monsanto’s CEO complaining that he cares about nothing but profit. Silly, isn’t it? But seriously-meant letters of complaint to pro-corporate regulators are the same thing. It’s fine to use such demands to unmask the regulator, the better to demolish its public credibility. But groups like this seem not to have this as their goal. They’re really naive enough to think they can “reform” the gangster organization. Similarly, USRTK seems sincerely to want these EPA materials even though EPA’s stonewalling is far more eloquent of the truth, and far more politically useful, than any release (no doubt heavily redacted) could ever be.

If humanity is ever to learn to fight, it must rouse itself from the consumerist, anti-political mire in which it currently wallows. It must transcend and renounce all consumerist consciousness and attain a true political consciousness.

One of the many litmus tests of this maturation is to evolve beyond the faith that regulators were ever supposed to be “public servants”, when this was always a lie. This lie always was obvious to anyone who cared to see with their own eyes.

As a system NGO, when Greenpeace says “conflict of interest” they’re referring to conventional corruption of “public servants” who are paid also by the industry they’re supposed to be regulating in accordance with scientific method.

Our abolitionist analysis is much deeper and more comprehensive than this, of course. While this kind of corruption is common, it’s epiphenomenal compared to the overall ideological and methodological framework of technocracy and the corporate science paradigm. Cadres of an agency like the ECHA, or the US EPA, FDA, and USDA, operate according to the corporate/technocratic template. Its three components are:

1. The corporate power/profit project is normative. It is the primary purpose of civilization. Under no circumstance can any other value or alternative project be allowed significantly to hinder the corporate project.

This has profound implications for actions like a pesticide cancer review. For technocratic regulators to acknowledge the fact that all synthetic pesticides cause widespread cancer would significantly hinder the corporate project. Therefore even the prospect of such acknowledgement is ruled out a priori. By definition it cannot be part of the review. Only the most grossly excessive and obvious carcinogenicity on the part of a particular chemical could be acknowledged even in principle. When outfits like the US EPA or the EU’s EFSA claim to believe that glyphosate is not cancerous, this is not according to any rational or scientific canon of evidence, and reformers who interpret it this way make a mistake about the fundamental character of these organizations.

Rather, technocratic regulators apply the canon of the corporate paradigm. According to this canon “causes cancer” is defined as: “So grossly carcinogenic that it’s politically impossible to deny it, to the point that lack of action would in itself be significantly bad for business.”

This is the template’s second component.

2. Given the strictures of (1), the regulator may if absolutely necessary impose limits on the most excessive harms and worst abuses. More often, it only pretends to do even this. Which leads to the template’s third component.

3. The regulator then puts its imprimatur on the corporate project as having been sufficiently regulated for safety. According to the ideology of technocracy and bureaucracy, the people are supposed to believe implicitly in the competence, rigor, and honesty of the regulator. They’re supposed to believe this for all measures of safety, public and environmental health, political and socioeconomic benefit and lack of harm.

All this is based on a Big Lie, since as we described above the regulator actually functions only according to the normative values of corporate power. But it fraudulently claims, always implicitly and very often explicitly, that it has acted on behalf of human values and to protect and serve the people. Therefore the people should repose implicit trust in the regulator, not assert themselves democratically in any kind of grassroots way, and most of all not start to think in any political terms which would be based on fundamentally different values and goals, values and goals opposed to those of corporate rule and technocracy.

Thus we see how technocracy is an ideology, method, and form of government which is fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-political as such since it is dedicated to the proposition that the people should relinquish all political activity and passively receive and believe the judgements of technocratic regulators. This system is based fundamentally on the Big Lie that it actually is a form of democracy and a form of society which encourages the political participation of the people. But in fact it conjures only sham versions of these and seeks aggressively to discourage and suppress any true politics.*

We see how the corporate state and technocracy, along with their allied economic ideology of neoliberalism, exist as species within the same genus as classical fascism. This is the genus of pseudo-democratic forms bled of all real political content which then stand as cultural facades behind which exists only state tyranny. Today’s corporate state is the most fully evolved form of this tyranny.

This site’s ultimate project is to oppose this tyranny. One prerequisite for such opposition is to understand what modern regulatory agencies truly are, and to renounce all faith in and support for them. As abolitionists one of our goals is completely to demolish all claims to legitimacy and authority of such agencies as the ECHA or US EPA. The destruction of such misguided faith is necessary for the people to conceive and commit to the necessary new ideas.

Toward that necessity, we need to substitute the more comprehensive analysis for the superficial and shallow “conflict of interest” and “corruption” notion. Corporate regulators, by their inherent nature, do not have conflicts of interest because their one and only interest is the corporate client. Everything else they claim about themselves is a lie.

The same Big Lie encompasses their ideology and propaganda of “science”. To take today’s example, the Greenpeace indictment specifically focuses on the ECHA panelists doubling as industry “risk assessment” consultants. We can leave aside the more vulgar modes of corruption though these too are common. Far more important, the entire concept, ideology, and methodology of “risk assessment” is based on the corporate profit endeavor as normative and therefore thinks, at most, in terms only of worst-case scenarios, never the omnipresent, chronic, daily harms and crimes of the corporate project. The official ideology of the US EPA is based on managing the human cancer and other tortures it and its corporate client inflict, via the concept of pesticide and cancer “tolerances”. This word should be taken literally: It means how much cancer can the corporate system cause before the magnitude becomes politically dangerous enough that the regulator needs to take evasive action, starting with sham reviews and lies meant to put the people back to sleep.

(Although the WHO as a whole has been consistently pro-corporate, the IARC is out of step with the dominant corporate/reductionist ideological framework, instead emphasizing environmental factors in cancer causation: “Emphasis is placed on elucidating the role of environmental and lifestyle risk factors and studying their interplay with genetic background in population-based studies and appropriate experimental models. This emphasis reflects the understanding that most cancers are, directly or indirectly, linked to environmental factors and thus are preventable.”

The proposition that cancer is preventable runs directly counter to the dominant “science” ideology which views cancer as arising from genetic determinism and which conceives the acceptable response to be massively expensive and interventionist cures supervised by Big Drug and other corporate sectors. This ideology is driven by the need of the poison-peddling corporations to obscure and deny the fact that profitable products like glyphosate are in fact major cancer drivers. The corporate flacks are abetted by scientism’s religious zealots who refuse to hear any evil spoken of their technological objects of cult worship.)

The IARC also is a pro-science renegade in that it assesses only the scientific public record, which according to Popperian canons is by definition the only scientific record. But the EFSA, EPA, and (we can expect) the ECHA adhere to an exactly upside-down, anti-scientific canon of “secret science”. Secret science of course is a contradiction in terms. By definition, if it’s not part of the public record and open to public perusal, analysis, and debate, it’s not part of science.

Today’s corporations, governments, universities, the mainstream media, and the scientific establishment all exalt the perverse notion of “secret science”. This means that we can reject their entire paradigm as, by definition, anti-science and not part of science. This underlies any specific evils of the lies being protected by the secrecy.

We abolitionists, in response, assume that anti-scientific secrecy automatically indicates the corporation and/or regulator has zero scientific evidence which supports them, and that what evidence they do have must prove the extreme harmfulness of the corporate product. In this case, the evidence for glyphosate’s cancerousness which Monsanto and the EPA actually possess is likely far worse even than the conclusive amount which has leaked out.

We see how technocratic regulators, in general and where it comes to specifics such as “risk assessment”, the cadre as a whole as well as specific agents, whether or not particular agents have conflicts of interest and/or are conventionally corrupt, all are part of the corporate science paradigm and therefore are anti-science and anti-democracy, according to Popperian canons of scientific method and the open society.

*This same corporate-technocatic template can be applied to the STEM establishment, the mainstream media, much “alternative” media, system NGOs, system political parties, and electoralism as such. The details may vary, never the broad function: To conserve the indoctrination that corporate rule is normative, as much as possible to render this water in which we swim implicit and imperceptible, where necessary to reinforce the indoctrination with propaganda, where necessary to offer sham “reforms” and sham pseudo-political “options”, all toward the goal of rendering truly political thought and action extremely difficult, preferably unthinkable.

Why did EPA post the thing now and then immediately retract it as “not yet final” when every page says “FINAL”? No doubt it was timed to influence the upcoming European vote on the relicensing of glyphosate. But why not post it and leave it up? This seems to indicate a lack of confidence at EPA, or maybe a lack of consensus on how to carry out pro-Monsanto strategy and tactics. Whatever’s going on with these idiots, they seem clumsy. If the idea is to bolster the EFSA’s political credibility with European state ministers by giving the EU’s agency EPA backup, how is this goal attained if the EPA immediately undercuts its own credibility by immediately retracting its own “final” report? According to the EPA’s own account they were incompetent and confused, as they claim they “inadvertently” posted all these documents, including stamping “FINAL” on every page of a report which they now claim is “not yet final”. All that’s been proven here is that the EPA can’t keep its own story straight for even a few hours, and that it lacks confidence in its own ability to sustain its contradiction of the fact that glyphosate causes cancer. It can get hard sometimes, committing crimes against humanity by systematically lying about these crimes.

*As was clear from the start, the number one pressing goal of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, Campbell’s, Mark Lynas, agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack, and the rest of the pro-Monsanto, anti-labeling brigade has been to prevent the Vermont labeling law from going into effect.

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Today we’re hearing from the Organic Consumers Association (OCA) of a new attempt at “compromise”, i.e. exactly the kind of scam I predicted all along. This is a version of what I call DARK Act Plan B. The idea is that since the original DARK Act which would directly preempt Vermont looks unable to pass in the Senate, the anti-Vermont forces with propaganda help from Gary Hirshberg (and probably the rest of industrial organic) will push for a two year Congress-imposed “delay” to prevent Vermont’s law from going into effect. This two years would then be used to get a more permanent preemption policy enacted, or for new lawsuits to be filed by the GMA, or to cause Vermont to wither and die in some other way. The OCA is right to be upset, although they too have been willing to waffle away from what used to be an uncompromising anti-preemption, pro-democracy position (i.e. for the state-level movement, against FDA preemption). Now we see where such waffling gets one.

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It’s always been clear that preemption is the absolute litmus test. To be uncompromisingly, unequivocally against preemption is a prerequisite for strong labeling, the right to know, and democracy. To be for preemption is to be against all these things, in principle and in practice.

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The history of preemption proves this, in the same way that the FDA’s history (especially where it comes to GMOs) proves its inability and unwillingness to enact or carry out a real labeling policy. These are examples of why pro-corporates hate history so much and do all they can to encourage people’s general anti-historical bent. Because movements which can’t be bothered to know their history set themselves up for assured failure.

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*A scientific panel of the French environmental ministry ANSES endorses the WHO’s finding that glyphosate is cancerous to humans. The environmental minister Segolene Royal publicly supports the panel and says she wants the agency to withdraw approval for glyphosate formulations, especially those containing the surfactant POEA. (There’s no rational or scientific difference between the so-called “active ingredient” in a pesticide or any other chemical product or drug, as opposed to the “inert ingredients”, which contrary to the English definition are often extremely toxic. Those two terms are purely ideological jargon meant to make the product seem less toxic than it is. In reality, commercial formulations are usually far more toxic than the nominally primary ingredient by itself. This is because the additional chemicals are there to render the primary ingredient more potent, and because these additional ingredients are often so poisonous in themselves. Plus any escalated synergy effect among these combined toxins. This is why corporations and regulators insist that only the so-called “active ingredient”, never the real-world formulation, be subject to whatever bogus testing they perform. It’s a scientific fraud and a public health crime. That’s how the BfR and EFSA were able to claim that the IARC was wrong about cancer, even as they admitted the evidence is there. They admitted that perhaps the commercial formulations may be carcinogenic. In other words they admitted that in real life glyphosate causes cancer. Royal and the ANSES panel are now taking what the EFSA said at face value and proceeding accordingly.) In 2015 Royal touted how proactive France allegedly is being, on the occasion of new legal restrictions on the sale of glyphosate at garden centers: “France must be on the offensive with regards to the banning of pesticides…I have asked garden centers to stop putting Monsanto’s Roundup on sale.” France also has bans or restrictions on aerial spraying of pesticides and spraying in parks.

*More of the same proven-to-fail scams from corporate “environmentalist” front groups like the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), which issued this fluff piece. “Habitat exchange”, that’s their new term for the same old scam? Meanwhile the real goal is always the same for the likes of the EDF, to misdirect focus away from the need to ban glyphosate, period. Because that’s what groups like the EDF are there for, to make sure the corporate project always continues unhindered. Therefore the corporate environmental prescription is always of the same basic form: Allow the corporation to continue destroying, often in what the flacks themselves call a “sacrifice zone”. But make a deal to somehow “make up for” the destruction through something like a “carbon offset” or a “mitigation” where another piece of land is allegedly not destroyed, or is restored, or is “improved”. The scam is often bolstered with a phony application of the “island biogeography” concept, even though even in principle the fragment “conserved” in some mangled state doesn’t even remotely resemble a bona fide natural island habitat. Meanwhile the conservation is always a straight-up scam. Almost all projects endorsed under “offset”-type scams were going to be built anyway, and almost all which are mothballed were going to be mothballed anyway. The conserved fragment often ends up destroyed anyway and is always severely damaged. The greenhouse gas emissions, chemical poisoning, carbon sink destruction and biodiversity destruction continue unabated. The corporate “environmental” front groups give PR cover to it all. “Habitat exchange” joins this Orwellian parade of happy lies.

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The evidence has been piling up which associates the monarch decline more and more strongly with glyphosate, especially as farm subsidies increasingly encourage cultivation of “marginal” land. Studies have assembled this evidence. Of course a corporate group like the EDF is congenitally capable of thinking only in terms of, at best, rejiggering the subsidy system (as this piece advocates). But that’s already proven to be a failure in general, and more often a fraud. (Now if we could all get together to campaign to abolish industrial farm subsidies completely, that would really be something worthwhile) At any rate it’s intentional misdirection in order to diffuse focus and waste time. I bet Monsanto’s hoping the monarch will go extinct ASAP so they can stop having to hear about it and everyone else will forget about it. We can take it to the bank that if we do anything but the opposite of what the likes of the EDF propose, we’ll lose the monarch in no time.

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*The whistleblower controversy at the USDA is blossoming into a bona fide scandal requiring even the attention of the department’s inspector general. Now the inquiry is expanding to take in animal abuse at USDA labs. Gratuitous neglect and abuse of animal subjects will automatically follow when the sociopathic commitment of a system reaches a certain point (today’s corporate regulators are way past that point), just as the scientists empowered by the Nazis to experiment upon human subjects in the concentration camps quickly went beyond the nominal scientific purposes of the research and started gratuitously inflicting pain and death, just for the hell of it, as a form of “pure science”. I think this fact is key for understanding everything that’s happening today, and where the vector is headed.

According to publicly-funded profit-oriented researchers at Britain’s John Innes Center, they’ve discovered a specimen of Arabadopsis thaliana (a mustard often used in botanical research, the plant equivalent of the fruit flies regularly used in genetic research) which is resistant to the antibiotic ciprofloxacin. This poison kills bacteria and plants by interfering with an enzyme necessary for photosynthesis. The researchers doused 400,000 mutated tissue-cultured specimens to find one which showed resistance to the antibiotic. (The rest were thrown out, typical of the extreme wastefulness and sociopathic attitude toward life inherent in all genetic engineering.) Next they’ll try to figure out how to turn the tolerance mutation into a transgene while they also work on an herbicide based on the antibiotic or a similar compound. The researchers disavow any intention of directly using the antibiotic as an herbicide, but of course this is a lie. We already see their paradigm’s standard attitude toward antibiotics in their attitude toward subtherapeutic antibiotic use in CAFOs and in genetic engineering itself including this experiment. Certainly no one among them would object to an antibiotic-based herbicide. Glyphosate is an antibiotic and was patented as such in the 1960s. Nor do these scientists, engineers, regulators, and corporate cadres care about the fact that existing commercial herbicides help trigger antibiotic resistance among potentially pathogenic bacteria, or that glyphosate selects for pathogenic bacteria in the mammalian digestive tract. No, I think we can rest assured that if the corporations demand such an herbicide and it can be made to work, these researchers will happily deliver it, and the AAAS will be right there cheering them on as it cheers on all these crimes against humanity and the Earth.

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The AAAS is also regurgitating the straight bald-faced Monsanto lie, most commonly told about glyphosate, that if a poison affects only plants and bacteria then it won’t affect humans: “This research also highlights another important benefit for using DNA gyrase as a target for the development of new herbicides. DNA gyrase is only present in plants and bacteria, and does not exist in animals. Therefore any new herbicides that target this DNA gyrase in plants are very unlikely to be any danger to humans.”

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Even if this were true as far as it goes (it’s a lie for glyphosate, which affects the mammalian cytochrome P450 and retinoic acid pathways as well as adversely affecting mineral chelation), it’s a complete lie because science knows humans and other mammals are symbiotic with our bacterial microbiome. What harms our gut bacteria, harms us. The AAAS knows this, they lie about it, they are criminally culpable for any harm which follows from it.

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The piece once again reminds us how by now the pro-GMO activists are perfectly at home simultaneously telling two mutually exclusive and directly contradictory lies, that “GMOs reduce pesticide use” while we also need “Eureka! New pesticides!” It’s also another example of how they’ve had to drop the whole line of bull that “we’re for hi-tech GMOs, not for luddite chemical pesticides” and especially “GMOs don’t equal Monsanto, and we ARE NOT Monsanto shills.” But then the WHO pretty much forced everyone’s hand on that one. Since then Monsanto’s needed all hands on deck to stick up for Roundup, no matter how much of a stupid, luddite, dinosaur technology it is. But then all of GMO agriculture is really only pseudo-advanced. It’s really all retrograde, backward, reactionary. It’s a jalopy on blocks, but with a flashy new paint-job, and those who fall for the hype are the kind of morons who would fall for any scam like that.

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*Looks like another dotcom bubble in the making. This provides some insight into the fundamentally fictive, socially engineered character of agribusiness. It plunges ahead not just in the regular bubble manner [i.e. unrelated to the real, productive economy, like the recent dotcom, tech, and housing bubbles, or today’s fracking bubble and general stock bubble] but in direct defiance of the real fundamentals of the sector. We see the basic lack of connection with reality which has always been evident with agricultural GMOs and genetic engineering in general. When an ideology has such direct contempt for science and reality, although corporate profiteering via government subsidies can prop it up and keep it going for awhile, it’s also bound to collapse quickly like any other bubble. Indeed, it wouldn’t surprise me if the erosion of the fundamentals for the agrochemical sector don’t go hand in hand with a bubble centered on the idea of “hi-tech agriculture”. Along with everything else that’s stupid, shoddy, and harmful about GMOs, I’ve always seen them as an aspiring tech bubble. Maybe someone who had a few extra bucks lying around who was thinking of dabbling in stocks might consider Monsanto along with some of these start-ups. These stocks have been disparaged for awhile now, but they might be ready to temporarily surge. The current mainstream excitement over mergers and further oligopoly consolidation, which ought to tell us how creatively bankrupt and decadent the sector is, can readily be transformed into the typical bubble irrationality. Just don’t be one of the idiots who buys high right before the bubble bursts. And for the divestment movement, if these stocks do start rising, make sure to tell the pension funds that it’s a bubble, hype over an idea which has no basis in reality and no staying power.